A Novel Arabic-Language Questionnaire to Assess Patient Satisfaction After Refractive Surgery

Purpose: to develop a questionnaire in Arabic language for assessment of patient satisfaction following refractive surgery. Design: Cross-sectional observational study by survey. Patients and methods: a 25-item questionnaire was self-answered by 327 patients 3 months after having a corneal refractive surgery. The questionnaire was subdivided into 3 subscales: 1- questions to assess vision (15 items), 2- questions to assess eye symptoms (5 items) and 3- questions to assess satisfaction (5 items). Validity and reliability of the questionnaire were assessed using both traditional method by factor analysis and Cronbach's alpha in addition to Rasch analysis. Results: The preoperative refraction of cases were myopia and myopic astigmatism (297), hyperopia and hyperopic astigmatism (3) and mixed astigmatism (27). Factor loadings ranged from 0.44 to 0.88. Cronbach's alpha values were 0.894 for the overall scale, 0.858 for the vision subscale, 0.699 for the eye symptoms subscale and 0.720 for the satisfaction subscale. Rasch analysis demonstrated high item reliability (0.94) and person reliability (0.88). Item fit statistics remained mostly within the acceptable range of 0.6 to 1.4. Conclusion: This novel questionnaire is valid and reliable for assessing satisfaction of the patients who had refractive surgery and whose native language is Arabic.